23 May 2018 3:07 PM

I was amused this morning by the contrast in coverage, in different outlets, of Oxford University’s latest figures on its struggle to satisfy the diversity fanatics.

Such people believe that our great universities should alter their entrance requirements in the cause of diversity, so as to achieve equality of outcome.

This view has, in recent years become pretty much universal, and I’ll come to that later. What those who accede to it do not realise is that, once they do so, they will still never actually satisfy these demands.

The Daily Telegraph headlined its report ‘A fifth of Oxford enrolments are now black or ethnic students’. You would have thought this was good news for the diversity campaigners, whose preoccupation with skin colour greatly troubles a sixties veteran such as me . We chanted – and believed - that there was ‘One Race – the Human Race’, and were appalled by South Africa’s system of racial classification based upon colour. While I understand that the modern state’s use of a parallel classification has a wholly different purpose, I still find it disturbing.

The Telegraph (publishing Oxford University’s new full disclosure of its admissions figures), reported that last year the number of Oxford students classed as ‘Black and ethnic minority rose to 17.9%, up from 13.9% four years ago.

In another triumph for equality of outcome, it was revealed more than six in 10 Oxford students were from state schools, said to be the highest level in the university’s history. I am not sure if this claim s true. By the mid-1960s, grammar schools and direct-grant schools were sending an ever-increasing number of pupils to Oxford, reaching 51% in 1965 (recorded in the Franks Report of 1966). In the brief remaining years during which these excellent state schools still existed in large numbers, it is quite possible that state school admissions reached 58%. Certainly my university, York, had a huge number of grammar school entrants when I started there in 1970, probably the last year in which there were still enough grammars and direct grants to achieve this effect. But I know of no Oxford statistics on this after 1966.

The Independent put it slightly differently, saying ‘A report by the institution found the proportion of UK undergraduates from disadvantaged areas was 11 per cent in 2017. This was an increase from 7 per cent in 2013, the Annual Admissions Statistical Report showed.

‘The proportion of students identifying as black and minority ethnic was 18 per cent last year, up from 14 per cent in 2013. There was a slight increase in the number of admissions from state schools during the same period, from 57 per cent to 58 per cent.’

The Times, in a strange, oblique story about how privileged Oxford students now seem to study geography, noted that ‘David Lammy, Labour MP for Tottenham, was instrumental in Oxford’s decision to release its admissions data annually from today. He spent years using freedom of information requests to build a picture of who gets a place.

But Mr Lammy was not - of course - satisfied by the news. He said the report had several key omissions, including data on how many students were drawn from the richest 20 per cent of households and how many of the state school students were from grammar school. Oxford said it did not have these breakdowns.

But why does Mr Lammy want to know? So that he can call for the opening of more grammars as they do so well? Somehow I doubt it).

Oxford, rather reasonably, pointed out that the proportion of black students was above the 1.8 per cent of black A-level students who get three ‘A’ grades [at ‘A’ level], generally essential for Oxford entrance.

But the most striking coverage came in the Guardian, which gave the story its most prominent position, and presented it as a failure by Oxford. The print edition headlined it ‘Oxford faces anger over failure to improve diversity among students’ – a line of attack more or less completely followed by the BBC’s Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme.

It opened : ‘Oxford’s glacial progress in attracting students from diverse backgrounds has been revealed in figures showing that more than one in four of its colleges failed to admit a single black British student each year between 2015 and 2017.

Several of the most prestigious colleges, including Balliol, University and Magdalen, each admitted two black British students as undergraduates during the three-year period.

The worst figures belonged to Corpus Christi College, which admitted a single black British student in those three years and attracted a dozen such applications.

Overall, white British applicants were twice as likely to be admitted to undergraduate courses as their black British peers – 24% of the former gained entry and 12% of the latter.’

I’d make a couple of comments about the above figures. It is extremely difficult for *anyone* to get into Oxford, from any sort of school. Oxford and Cambridge annually reject thousands of applicants from state and private schools, whose A level results are excellent.

Oxford’s point, that ‘the proportion of black students was above the 1.8 per cent of black A-level students who get three ‘A’ grades [at ‘A’ level],’ seems to me to destroy at a blow any suggestion that some sort discrimination is at work here.

As for the figures of black students at individual colleges, these seem to me to be indicative of nothing much. If you researched the presence, in individual colleges, of any other group of applicants which formed 1.8% of qualified applicants, you would find low numbers of that group in some colleges, and none at all in others. The colleges vary greatly in size.

I am told that there are also one or two other measurable factors – black students tend to apply for the vocational courses that are hardest to get into. And disproportionately large numbers of black students fail to meet the required grades after getting offers.

These facts may indicate problems in the school system, but they do not reveal discrimination at Oxford itself.

Now, many people genuinely believe that Oxford and Cambridge should deal with this problem by making special exceptions and exemptions.

I am not one of them. I don’t think I need to go into *all* the possible reasons. I have one main one. Oxford and Cambridge are good because they are hard to get into. Those who can get past their selection are more likely to benefit from the courses they offer than those who cannot. Of course, those who fall behind in education through no fault of their own deserve and need help, but an undergraduate course is really too late in life for such remedial action. The effect of monitoring Oxbridge colleges for diversity will be to turn these great universities into comprehensive universities, just like the rest of our failed education system, so making them worse.

If we want our great universities to be fairer, without damaging them, then we have to do something about schools, in my view both in primary schools and in secondaries, before disadvantages solidify into permanence . I have in fact put thus point to Professor Louise Richardson, the University Vice-Chancellor, when I sat at the same table as her at an Oxford dinner a couple of years ago. I told her about the amazing success of the grammar and direct grant schools, in winning places at Oxford in the 1950s and 1960s. I even followed up our conversation by sending her a brief note, giving her the research references for these facts. Alas, I have seen no sign since that she is interested. This is a great pity. Voices such as hers could turn the tide in this debate.

It is only because the telescoped grades of the GCSE and the diluted ‘A’ level replaced the fierce grading of the old pre-1965 O and A levels, that Oxbridge can set three ‘A’ grades as the necessary minimum. Three ‘A’ grades at ‘A’ level in 1965 was, if not unheard of, pretty uncommon.

When I was at school it was often stated, and I believe it to have been true, that a set of English ‘A’ levels were more or less equivalent to an American university degree. There was a thing called the Brain Drain, under which American employers came to this country to recruit our graduates because they were so far ahead of Americans of the same age.

The decision to introduce comprehensive education was falsely sold as ‘grammar schools for all’ because Labour knew perfectly well that grammar schools were popular and people liked them. In its 1959 manifesto, Labour fibbed : ‘…we shall get rid of the 11-plus examination. The Tories say this means abolishing the grammar schools. On the contrary, it means that grammar-school education will be open to all who can benefit by it.’ (My emphasis) In 1964, Labour equally falsely stated in its manifesto ‘Within the new system, grammar school education will be extended: in future no child will he denied the opportunity of benefiting from it through arbitrary selection at the age of 11.’ (My emphasis). We now have arbitrary selection at 11 by parental wealth, and in any case comprehensive standards are way below those of grammars in 1964.

The House of Commons Library recently produced a briefing paper comparing school exam performance in the year 2014-15. On the key measure of the percentage achieving five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C, including English and Maths, grammars achieved 96.7 per cent.

The average for all state schools was 58.1 per cent. That was, interestingly, also the average for all independent schools. For comprehensives it was 56.7 per cent. For the (wrongly despised) secondary moderns, it was 49.7 per cent. Note the rather small difference between secondary moderns and comprehensives, which we were told would be so much better, thanks to some strange magical cargo-cult process through which destroying grammars would bring benefits to those who could not go to them.

What we actually have is secondary moderns for all, except the rich. And these glorified secondary moderns (nowadays known as ‘academies’) feed their pupils into second-rate universities, for which they must pay large fees and become indebted, , while often denying them the vocational education they really need.

Academic selection in secondary schools would benefit the primary schools which prepared children for that selection, and the universities which received their pupils. Standards would rise for all, and the children of the poor, whatever the colour of their skin, would have a far greater chance of achieving full use of their talents than they can dream of now. By the way, has anyone done any work on how many children from what is called the ‘white working class’ are getting into Oxford? That might be interesting.

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20 May 2018 1:13 AM

The mere sight of an armed police officer in this country makes me instantly furious and miserable. Sometimes I just have to look away, while I collect myself. Then I hurry off, as fast as I can.

This is instinctive and emotional. But it is not irrational. The reasons for it run deep. I was brought up in a country which was actively proud that its police were not armed.

Now I am told that rural police are to be armed on the excuse that this will guard our shires against terrorism. It is a pretext. It just means that, like everywhere else, our police will routinely have firearms. This will be the end of Britain as it was.

We used to think that other, less happy nations might need to use guns to keep order. We did not. And for many years I returned from travels abroad and rejoiced at this difference between my home and foreign lands.

As George Orwell said, the beer was bitterer and the coins were heavier. And the police were different. They weren't the unapproachable scowling army of the state, they were the police of a free, peaceful population, our allies against crime and disorder.

Then, after an especially long stint overseas, I came back, looked for the familiar constables I was used to, and I found that we now had cops instead. It was the beginning of one of the most profound changes in our society that has ever taken place, one about which we were not consulted, and which was never openly discussed.

They stopped walking, except occasionally in pairs. They zoomed about in cars, they wore flat caps and big boots, handcuffs, clubs and a mass of ironmongery hung from their big belts. And, affected by this transformation, they had begun to swagger and scowl as well. No wonder. All this clattering stuff said clearly that they did not like or trust the public any more.

Bit by bit it grew worse. Even in my peaceful home town I began to see cops with sub-machine guns standing grimly outside court buildings. The flat caps gave way to baseball caps.

And in the capital I learned to expect to see armed officers, on the excuse (which I think is thin) that they are guarding embassies and other sensitive buildings. If the threat is really that great, then the Army should guard them. If not, then taking police constables away from their real jobs, and employing them as sentries, should end.

People will tell me that 'lives would have been saved' if armed police officers had been present at some recent supposed terrorist incidents. But my researches show that almost all these events were the work of deranged individuals out of their minds on drugs. The fast-spreading abuse of drugs is, pretty certainly, the main single reason for the much higher levels of violence we now have.

It is so obvious. People in their right minds recoil from serious violence. But mind-altering drugs make them capable of terrible actions. If every violent criminal (and suicide) was checked for his use of marijuana, steroids or antidepressants, I think the connection would rapidly become undeniable. But powerful, rich lobbies fear such checks.

If we had a proper patrolling police force of the old kind, many of these incidents would never happen. Such a force would apply the boring laws on drug possession which our armed and scowling gendarmes, and their soppy, pseudo-intellectual chief officers, think are beneath them. Through their intimate knowledge of their beats and their frequent contact with the law-abiding, they would be aware of the strange behaviour of such people long before it became a danger.

For an unarmed, modest, old-fashioned police force, which walks quietly among us, has millions of willing eyes and ears, in the shape of a friendly and supportive public.

But an armed state militia, dressed for combat with its face set in a rigid frown and its hands ever reaching for gun, club or handcuffs, such as we now have, is a stranger to the people. And as well as making us look like a foreign despotism, it will fail in its task.

***

Finally! A detective driven by real justice

At last a TV crime drama which challenges the police’s growing tendency to believe the accused is guilty until proven innocent.

In ITV's Innocent, Angel Coulby plays a highly intelligent and thoughtful police officer, contrasted with a dim-witted and dishonest colleague who bends the evidence to fit his prejudices.

And, as a result, someone who looks wholly guilty is exonerated, in the face of public prejudice.

I do wish TV drama chiefs would now discover the works of the detective story writer Josephine Tey, a million times cleverer than Agatha Christie. Her brilliant books specialise in overturning prejudice and defying the obvious.

***

The ONLY way to rescue our railways

Nationalisation is the natural state of modern railways. Dress it up any way you like, they are never going to make a real profit. The benefit they give to our civilisation cannot be measured in money alone, but in speed, safety, energy efficiency, clean air and reduced noise pollution.

The absurd 'privatisation' imposed on them by silly John Major in the 1990s has never worked, and will never work. The increase in passenger numbers which came soon afterwards wasn't because of privatisation. It resulted from an explosion in long-distance commuting, caused by high house prices. Had it been given the enormous subsidies handed to the privatised train companies, efficient old British Rail could have given us a network to be proud of.

Time and again privatisation has failed, even on its own terms. Last week, yet again, the majestic East Coast route had to be taken back into public ownership because private contractors have made a mess of it.

They did so in spite of the fact that BR had handed them an electrified and highly modern line.

People who think private operators have made this service better don't know what they're talking about. I look at the ghastly Virgin services of the past few years, with their horrible matey publicity, stupid notices in the lavatories, flashy livery and incomprehensible fares.

And then I think of the sight of the old Tyne-Tees Pullman coming into the great curve of York station in the 1970s, with a uniformed attendant at every door, smack on time; or of the beautiful, steam-hauled Elizabethan in the 1950s carrying me south across the Forth Bridge. If Richard Branson's tawdry trains are an improvement on them, then the world's been turned upside down.

***

I'm rather impressed with Lord Attlee, the Tory peer who's the grandson of our greatest Labour premier (and looks amazingly like his grandfather). Not only does he chivalrously admit defeat when beaten in a fair fight, as he was over press controls, but he also has a sense of humour. Asked on Sunday if he had anything against the press, he replied: 'My only complaint is that hardly anyone has ever heard of me.'

***

I've often assumed that a lot of rock songs are about drugs. In fact, I regard the rock industry as advertising for the drug culture. But the stars themselves often deny it. So I nearly spilt my tea last Tuesday morning when Mick Jagger, interviewed on Radio 4, casually remarked that his song You Can't Always Get What You Want (much liked by Donald Trump) is 'about drugs in Chelsea'.

***

So off we go once more to the futile battlegrounds of Afghanistan, where no foreign army has succeeded, ever. This time we're being assured that British troops will be there only to train the Afghans. Last time we were told that their mission would be accomplished without a shot being fired. Yet within months the flag-wrapped coffins were being flown home. 'When will they ever learn?' as Marlene Dietrich used to sing.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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16 May 2018 4:28 PM

I suspect I wouldn’t much like Mick Herron, author of the increasingly acclaimed ‘Slow Horses’ series of thrillers. There’s an undercurrent of boring, self-satisfied conventional leftism in his work, which most of his readers probably don’t notice because they are like that too. It’s a pity, because in many ways the books are very good. The later books of ‘John le Carre’, where he develops a tedious anti-Thatcherite and anti-American tone, would likewise be better without this self-indulgence. Is Mr Herron’s political stance (if I have read it correctly) important? We’ll see.

My complaint isn’t, by the way, made because of his persistent use of a fictional Tory politician, with certain close resemblances to a well-known national figure of our times, as a sort of villain with secrets to hide. I’m interested that he gets away with this, but any fiction set in modern times and using real people as background is quite likely to resort to this sort of thing.

Though my complaint is connected. It’s more because one of his early characters, by no means an admirable one, bears a faint resemblance to me – a right-wing newspaper columnist who tends to blame the late Roy Jenkins for many of the country’s present ills.

Of course, this person turns out to be a secret Nazi, who has been ruined by the exposure of this fact, but we all know (don’t we?) that this is what people like me are: secret Nazis.

Later on in the series there’s an anti-EU politician, who slightly resembles a real person, married to a strident female columnist who closely resembles a real person. Both of them, likewise, turn out to be profoundly flawed in the sort of ways left-wing persons like to imagine such people are flawed.

One of the other reasons why I mention this is because none of the reviews of Mr Herron’s books seem to have picked up on this. Who is he? I’ve no idea, though we know that he lives in Oxford, my home town, and was for many years a ‘legal sub--editor’, which sounds pretty unexciting –either very good cover or very dull. Not like ‘Le Carre’ (aka David Cornwell) who is believably supposed to have done stints in both the Security Service (‘MI5’) and the Secret Intelligence Service (‘MI6’) .

Having read all Mr Herron’s published books in the ‘Slow Horses’ series( he has written others which I haven’t read) I have two comparisons to make. They are partial comparisons. There is a touch of Raymond Chandler, because so much of the plots don’t really matter at all, or even make very much sense. Does anyone really know what happens in ‘The Big Sleep?’ ‘The High Window’ or ‘Farewell My Lovely’? I have read them all at least five times and don’t really know, or have forgotten. What I remember is the nightclubs, the cars, the women, the hungover awakenings, with mild hallucinations, the hothouse and the Brasher doubloon, but above all the dialogue and the wit. The fun is all in the writing, the style, the description and the events. Of course he is much ruder and cruder than Chandler, and also ruder and cruder than P.G.Wodehouse. Wodehouse has people ‘recoiling like a salted snail’. Herron’s rather revolting central character is described as, among other things ‘a misplaced squid’ and ‘a post-coital warthog’.

The preposterous idea at the heart of these books is that MI5, which Herron wrongly describes from time to time as the ‘Secret Service’, has a grim outstation staffed by failures, incompetents and loose cannons (‘Slow Horses’) who have been exiled forever from his fictional Security Service’s fictional smart headquarters at Regent’s Park. They can never go back there. They must remain forever in this place of exile.

In this miserable, shabby building, jeeringly known as ‘Slough House’ though this isn’t its name, they are given wretched make-work tasks, to drive them mad or persuade them to resign. Their individual failings – drug abuse, gambling, wild ultra-violence, delusions of grandeur, are lovingly enumerated. Only one of them is there unjustly but this too is deemed to have been his fault. If he had been any good, he wouldn’t have allowed himself to be stitched up. In charge of this failure factory is the grotesque, obese, flatulent chain-smoker, boozer and consumer of horrible food Jackson Lamb, who presumably has this post because he knows too much about his senior colleagues to be fired, but also cannot be allowed back into the Regent’s Park headquarters.

Lamb is a monster, rude, cruel, overbearing, squalid and, one has to imagine, very smelly indeed. It is not clear if he has a home to go to. If he does, it must be a hideous, sordid lair. Herron appears to view smoking as a sort of sign of virtue and protest against the shiny ethics of political correctness, which he affects to despise but doesn’t, I think, really disagree with in any deep way. If Jackson Lamb really existed, he would either be dead from a combined attack of lung cancer, heart failure, emphysema and obesity, or drooling in a care home. Yet despite his incessant cigarettes, bottles of whisky and appalling takeaway feasts, he can still overpower and outfight far younger, fitter men. He can also out-think them. This is because of his heroic past as an agent in the field in the Cold War, though quite what MI5 was doing in Berlin on the Cold War I’m not sure. I am endlessly irritated by the way in which MI5 is described as a spy service, and its bosses are described as spy chiefs. This is not what they do.

But there, why complain about lack of authenticity in what is, in the end, a fantasy? There are some (often very well described) outrages of the kind MI5 is always claiming to prevent. But what follows is more or less absurd, as the useless ‘Slow Horses’ find themselves somehow drawn into schemes and counter-plots which the mainstream Security Service does not, cannot or will not address.

I might as well moan about how Philip Marlowe doesn’t have his own fingerprint kit, or try to dissect Jeeves’s little miracles, in which he once again saves Bertie Wooster from himself, Roderick Spode or one member or another of the Glossop family.

It doesn’t matter. Because the writing is often very funny, even if it resorts to crudity and F-bombs more often than it really needs to, and the plots have the power to pull you along and keep you reading, a rare talent.

That’s why these books worry me. Because while they grip and entertain, they also seem to me to embody and accept the questionable idea that some sort of secret security service really does keep us safe, a claim I think at best unproven. And they blithely posit (and seem to excuse if not applaud) the supposed existence of cellars deep beneath the fictional Regent’s Park headquarters where something which looks and sounds a lot like torture takes place. And it’s sort of funny. Which it isn’t. And then there’s that Nazi columnist. This is how ideas take root.

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14 May 2018 4:41 PM

I thought it was time to write a small article in defence of ‘Whataboutery’, also known as ‘Whataboutism’ or ‘Tu Quoque’ (Thou also [dost this thing]’)

I am surprised by how easily some people are persuaded that a point is wrong when it is dismissed as ‘Whataboutism’. Why, when the person making the case is claiming a moral fault, is it not legitimate to point out that he himself has the same fault?

The Bible is pretty clear on this.

IN The Gospel according to St Matthew Chapter 7, vv 3-5, Our Lord says : ‘And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? ‘Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.’

The same metaphor appears in almost identical words in the Gospel according to St Luke, vv 41-2 . It seems odd, when moralising in a society whose morals are supposed to be Christian (indeed, on what other basis can we approve or disapprove of any action?), to classify the preaching of Jesus Christ as either a fallacy or as ‘whataboutery’.

The term ‘whataboutism’ seems to have first appeared in the Cold War, when the USSR might point to the American treatment of the black minority there, when attacked for being a police state with labour camps.

But this was feeble. The two things are not the same. Certainly the USA is very far from being a perfect society, and its treatment of African-Americans has been ( and to some extent remains) highly unsatisfactory.

But this simply wasn’t comparable with the USSR’s system of censorship, repression and political trials. What’s more, anyone who knows anything about Russia knows that ethnic bigotry is very common in Russia, generally directed against the nearest available targets, Central Asians, Chechens and peoples from beyond the Caucasus, but liberally applied to anyone with a dark skin from any part of the planet.

The Soviet propaganda was more effective when it responded to complaints of Soviet repression in the satellite states of eastern Europe by noting that the USA did not readily tolerate governments hostile to it in Latin America. But there were differences even here. In fact, since the days of the Marsahll Plan in the 1940s, a fundamentally free-market and politically conservative USA had often allied with social democratic governments in Western Europe, despite not liking their internal policies very much. The USSR, except in its very late stages when it tolerated Hungary’s semi-capitalist ‘goulash communism’, demanded Communist Party rule in theory and practice.

In general the USR’s propaganda, and the arguments of its apologists in the West, could rightly be dismissed as ‘false equivalence of opposites’. There were similarities between the superpowers, but they were trivial, whereas there were differences, and they were fundamental.

So now let us turn to the new bout of alleged ‘Whataboutery’. I am myself struck by the profound similarities between Russian intervention in Syria, and Russia’s use of airpower against Islamist urban guerrillas in Aleppo, and Western intervention in Iraq and the sue of western airpower against Islamist urban guerrillas in Mosul.

I pointed this out a couple of years ago, in conversation with Christina Lamb, on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show. Ms Lamb scoffed, but I have never bene able to see why she did. The main difference between the two events is not material. In both cases the Islamists were using the population as hostages in dense built-up areas; in both cases the major outside powers eventually sued heavyweight airpower to crush them, with substantial civilian casualties. Nobody disputes that these attacks happened, or that innocent people died in them. But, as I’ve pointed out here, the quantity and tone of the reports on Aleppo have been quite different from those of the reports on Mosul.

But in Russia’s case, media, ‘NGOs’ and diplomats accused Russian forces of deliberately targeting civilians, hospitals, etc (I have seen zero proof of this deliberate targeting, for which you would need access to the orders given to the pilots, it seems to me) . No such charges (quite rightly) were made against US British or other coalition air forces.

This isn’t false equivalence of opposites. This is false opposition of equivalents.

I mention this by way of introduction to three points I wish to make about today. The first is the story of Abdel Hakim Belhaj (or Belhadj, if you prefer, I don’t mind). Britain now admits helping in an operation in which this man was kidnapped by the CIA , along with his wife, held in a secret prison before being flown in chains to Libya, where the Gaddafi state was free to torture him at will in its disgusting dungeons.

The Guardian reported that our Prime Minister, Theresa May ‘admitted the UK should have done more to reduce the risk that the couple could be mistreated and had wrongly missed opportunities to help them once they were held in the prisons of the then Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi.

‘The Prime Minister acknowledged that Britain should have realised sooner that its international allies were involved in unacceptable practices, implying criticism of Libya for torturing suspects as well as the CIA's practice of rendition.’

This is so naïve it makes Pollyanna look like Machiavelli, and would be rather sweet if it didn’t involve people being chained up, starved, hooded, wrapped in duct tape, kidnapped by operatives of the Land of the Free and crammed into secret jails, and then loaded on to unmarked aircraft for a trip to one of the world’s worst tyrannies.

There’s a little side-bar to it, as well, which I find intensely moving. I don’t have much time for John McCain in general, though (like any sentient being) I have always felt that he conducted himself with extreme courage and dignity during his nightmare captivity in North Vietnam.

Now Senator McCain is very ill and close to death. The Guardian notes : ‘This is a very live issue indeed. In Washington, Gina Haspel is currently having her confirmation hearings as Donald Trump's new CIA director. From 2002, Ms Haspel ran the secret CIA centre in Thailand where inmates were tortured and where Ms Boudchar [Belhaj’s wife, pregnant at the itme of her state-sponsored kidnap] was mistreated. Mr Trump supports torture. He wants to bring back waterboarding. John McCain, the only US senator to have actually been tortured, is fighting Ms Haspel's nomination on that basis.’

A White House aide has sneeringly remarked that Senator McCain is ‘dying anyway’ . And it looks as if PresidentTrump won’t be welcome at Senator McCain’s funeral

So this is the civilised West at work, and with that a background, a certain Andrew Parker, Director-General of the British Security Service( known to many as MI5) has made a pious speech in Berlin.

Let ,me get something straight here. Aided by the TV series ‘Spooks’, the BSS has got itself a glamorous toughie reputation, and many people refer to it as a spy service. It is not. It has no espionage duties.

In fact the only accurate generic name for such an organisation, especially given the huge budgets, status and immunity form scrutiny which it enjoys these days, is that it is a form of Secret Police agency . True, it so far lacks powers of arrest. But, following the granting of such powers to civil servants (a major breach of an ancient rule) in the ‘National Crime Agency’, it cannot be long before this line is crossed.

As usual when the principles of English liberty are being raped or tossed lightly aside, few realise the significance of the granting of powers of arrest to civil servants. Civil servants are under the direct authority of government, and of ministers.

Police officers are not and have never been civil servants. They are sworn constables, whose duty is to *the law*, which they have sworn an oath to uphold without fear or favour, and not to the state itself. This position gives them the freedom, and indeed the duty, to refuse an unlawful order from a technical superior. Their local nature also helps them to resist central government pressure ( though they are nothing like as local as they should be, or as they were before the Jenkins-imposed mergers of 1967) - though the Ministry of Defence Police, the British Nuclear Police and the British Transport Police are national bodies perhaps more subject to Whitehall than they should be.

My own nightmare is the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004 (read it some time), an emergency powers law so extensive that the government of the day can, if it wishes, turn this country into a sort of dictatorship in a matter of hours. So forgive me if I am not a great enthusiast for MI5. And forgive me if I am sceptical about its frequent, uncheckable claims to have thwarted terror plots. If I had a budget that big, was treated with similar reverence as that accorded to MI5, and was that well-screened from scrutiny, I too might be inclined to make boasts about how good I was at my job. Who could gainsay me? But now Mr Parker has gone to Berlin to make a well-trailed speech (front page of the semi-official newspaper ‘The Times’ and all over the BBC this morning), warning Russia that its behaviour, notably over the Skripals, might make it even more of a pariah.

Well, no doubt, but I am tempted to say ‘What about the Belhaj case (and what about the Trump administration’s view of torture and its chosen candidate to head the CIA?). It doesn’t seem to me that a muted apology in the Commons and a cheque for Mr Belhaj’s wronged wife really suggest that we have cleaned out the stables. Does that not make Britain and the USA pariahs too, and if not, why not?

And then let us note the arrival in London of Mr Recep Tayip Erdogan, President of Turkey, whose sinister nature has many times been discussed in this blog, and whose rapidly darkening country I have twice visited to document this. Mr Erdogan has in recent months turned what was a fairly free and law-governed country into a despotism. The prisons are full of journalists. The courts are lawless instruments of state power. Independent newspapers and broadcasters have been terrified into submission. Mr Erdogan is gathering all the power in Turkey into his person, and creating an executive presidency at least as menacing to a free society as Vladimir Putin’s.

His foreign policy is also highly dangerous, and is causing grave friction in Syria. Oh, and Turkey still occupies North Cyprus, which it invaded in July 1974 in an action which is an extraordinarily close diplomatic and political parallel to Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea in 2014.

Yet Mr Erdogan is not called a pariah, and is to be welcomed at Downing Street and given tea with the Queen (as well as offered excellent deals on military equipment), photo opportunities and developments which will help him , in a rapidly approaching election, to consolidate his despotic power.

So, Mr Parker, What About That? What about Mr Belhaj? And What About Mr Erdogan? Is your wrath at Russia genuine? If it is, why do you not feel it for those who took part in the sordid kidnapping and rendition of Mr Belhaj, and who defend or excuse torture as an instrument of the state? And why do you not make speeches in Berlin (or come to that in Birmingham or Basildon), attacking Turkey?

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Some readers may be interested in my appearance on the BBC Sunday morning programme 'The Big Questions' , in which I discussed Press Regulation and (briefly) whether it is possible to have a religion without God, or something like that.

13 May 2018 7:28 PM

Typical Russians, eh? They kidnap a man and his pregnant wife in broad daylight, then hide them in a secret prison in an Asian airport where they wield sinister influence.

There they begin to torture him. Despite the fact that she is obviously pregnant, they chain her to a wall and put a hood over her head, for five days.

Next, they swathe her from head to toe in duct tape (in agony, because one of her eyes is taped open) and fly them both to Syria so he can be tortured more thoroughly for several years.

With the two chained and bound prisoners comes a delivery note from the Russian spy chief to his Syrian opposite number: ‘This is the least we could do for you, to demonstrate our remarkable relationship’.

This is the sort of disgusting behaviour we have come to expect from the Kremlin. Except that I have changed the details. This story is not about the Kremlin. It is about the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and our allies in the American CIA. And the man we helped kidnap, Abdel Belhaj was not sent to Syria, but to Libya, whose then despot we were courting.

All the details of this unspeakable, lawless operation are known, and cannot be denied. They came out into the open only because a group of militiamen happened to stumble on the papers in an abandoned office in Tripoli.

The government has admitted their truth by apologising for them, and writing a large cheque (with your hard-earned money, of course) to Mr Belhaj’s wife, Fatima Boudchar. Nobody is even trying to deny them, though the Labour Government ministers in charge at the time (2004) seem to be having some trouble remembering the episode.

There are plenty of things you can think about this, including whether those involved, politicians and civil servants alike, ought to face some kind of justice. I would not hold out many hopes.

My point is this. So much of our current frenzy against Russia and Syria is based on a claim of moral superiority. Do we have any such superiority if we kidnap people and send them to tyrants to be tortured? So shoudn’t we stop pretending that our hostility to Russia and Syria has a moral purpose – and explain what, in that case, our motive really is?

Or are we embarrassed that our motive is almost as sordid as the miserable Belhaj episode?

Certainly since before the 2003 Iraq invasion, which members of the current government mostly supported, this country has been implicated in the most horrible actions, many of which will probably remain secret forever.

Strangely, many of these kidnaps and much of this complicity in unspeakable tortures was justified by our moral fury against Al Qaeda, a movement with whom we now co-operate in Syria.

It is also quite possible to argue (and I do) that the Iraq invasion was the gravest political mistake of our age, closely followed by David Cameron’s attack on Libya.

We are now hurrying towards serious war in the Middle East, lashed to the strange, seemingly unhinged figure of Donald Trump, whose vain, pouting, writhing performance on Tuesday night was one of the most frightening things I have ever seen in my life. Could it possibly have been plainer that he views us not as allies but as minions?

And why shouldn’t he, if we collaborate with the CIA in actions like these?

A proper British government would cease this sort of co-operation, whatever little treats and pats on the head we may be offered in return for it. And a proper British government should also stand aside from war policies in the Middle East which will only lead to still more terror, torture and pain.

*********

Talking of war, and Syria, many of you may have noticed frequent references in the media to a body called the ‘Syrian Observatory for Human Rights’, often quoted as if it is an impartial source of information about that complicated conflict, in which the British government clearly takes sides. The ‘Observatory’ says on its website that it is ‘not associated or linked to any political body.’

To which I reply: Is Boris Johnson’s Foreign Office not a political body? Because the FO just confirmed to me that ‘the UK funded a project worth £194,769.60 to provide the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights with communications equipment and cameras.’ That’s quite a lot, isn’t it? I love the precision of that 60p. Your taxes, impartially, at work.

********

Rosamund Pike is one of the cleverest and wittiest actresses of our time, as she showed in the wonderful ‘An Education’. And it is interesting to see the 1970s, that lost decade, so meticulously recreated. But I am not quite sure about the OK, but flawed new film about the 1976 Entebbe hijack.

The great thing about Entebbe was that the bravery and skill of the Israeli commandos meant almost all the hostages were saved, and the terrorists were killed. This was a distinct turn for the better in an era when hijackers far too often got away with their crimes.

Nobody wept, or wondered if this had been the right thing to do. These disgusting people, Germans among them, had actually separated the Jewish passengers from the others. They were bad enough before they did that. After they did it, they had passed into a zone of evil from which there can be no return.

But there is something dangerously soppy about the film’s attitude towards the hijackers. Sure, they were human. That is precisely why their actions deserved to be ended and punished with violent death. Because they knew better. The film’s apparent belief that negotiation, even with such people, is a good thing is simply untrue.

It is precisely because we have talked to and rewarded so many terrorists, from the PLO to the IRA, that terrorism continues to flourish. If all terrorists died as the Entebbe criminals died, there would be a lot less terror.

******

The President of Peking University (yes, despite our feeble Cultural Kowtow of saying ‘Beijing’ they still call it that) says students should not be encouraged to question or to think critically because it ‘hinders steps for the future’.

He should obviously come here instead, as so many British students (and professors) are frightened out of their wits by any departure from orthodoxy, he’d fit in very well.

******

Why do feminists make fusses about nothing – such as the current persecution of a man in a lift who asked, jokingly, for someone to press the button for the ladies’ lingerie floor? It is because they long ago achieved their aims, but admitting it would mean they’d have to find something else to do.

Don’t take my word for it. The playwright David Edgar recounts this week that as far back as the 1970s a feminist manual written by the militant Anna Coote ‘had to be quickly revised because so many of its demands had been won’. In fact the left won almost everything it wanted years ago. That is why we are in such a mess.

*****

A tiny gleam of light in the endless, swirling, flatulent fog of the European debate: The possibility that Britain may remain inthe European Economic Area, so getting rid of three quarters of the EU’s laws, while not madly damaging its trade with EU countries, is still just about alive. One day, people will realise what a good idea this is.

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10 May 2018 4:23 PM

Some readers may be interested in this extended version (from 'First Things') of the Twitter argument I have every few weeks with Roman Catholic sectarians, about the important difference between the aggressive persecution of Protestants by the Roman Catholic Monarchs Henry VIII and Mary I, and the much more political pursuit of Roman Catholics by the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I.

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07 May 2018 3:21 PM

The madness of 1968, even recalled at this distance, looks like a plague or a panic rather than a rational upheaval. The May events in Paris started with a row about male students having access to female dormitories at the University of Nanterre, which really doesn’t stand much comparison with the defence of the cannons of Montmartre during the Paris Commune of 1871, let alone the storming of the Bastille in 1789, the convulsion’s supposed forerunners. On the other hand, it is a sign of what this was all really about – the dawning of the Age of the Self. Only afterwards did anyone try to think up a political rationale for this curious spasm. Who (I speak for myself) hasn’t at some stage yearned to do battle with the forces of order, especially in the springtime on the picturesque boulevards of the Paris Latin Quarter, where the blue hour of evening brings a unique sense of longing? Well if you haven’t, you haven’t. But I will not pretend. As I watched the wavering images on the TV news, of a Paris I had by then visited once in my life (but by which I had been wholly captivated, immediately and for always), and heard the evocative sound of multitudes chanting slogans in French, I wanted more than anything to be under the freshly green boughs of the trees on the Boulevard St Michel as dusk came, hurling a cobblestone at the CRS riot squad.

But if that wasn’t available, and for most of us it wasn’t, because travel was expensive and in those days we had enough but not too much money, there was always Grosvenor Square and its squatting concrete symbol, surmounted by a great bronze eagle, of all we affected to despise - the American Embassy. In fact the first big outbreak of trouble there predated the French May events by several weeks (though France's troubles were already gestating). And though it may really have been about sex, drugs and rock and roll, we, being British, pretended before, during and afterwards that it was about Vietnam, a subject on which we could all posture like anything. A great cause gives dignity and purpose to pubescent ferment. Our petty squabbles with parents and teachers could be given grandeur and virtue, if we claimed it was all really about Vietnam.

Likewise the French student revolutionaries, who sought the mantle of 1789 and 1871, and several other revolts and risings too, I should think, first emerged in a rather comical incident at the Nanterre Campus of the University of Paris. As the historian Tony Judt recounted in his book ‘Postwar’ (p.409) the grubby student dormitories there had become home to a ‘floating population’ of genuine students, transient radicals, and drug abusers and dealers.

‘Rent passed unpaid. There was also considerable nocturnal movement to and fro between the male and female dormitories, in spite of strict official prohibitions.’ There had also been an attempt to discipline the interesting future student hero (and even more future Euro MP) Daniel Cohn-Bendit, for heckling a Gaullist Minister for Youth, Francois Missoffe, who had gone to Nanterre to open a new swimming pool. The clash was very funny, not least because the Minister gave as good as he got, and suggested mordantly that M. Cohn-Bendit (who complained about the sex segregation in the dormitories, referring to this issue as 'sexual problems’) would find a better outlet for his youthful urges by jumping into the nice new swimming pool which had been built for him. ‘If you have sexual problems’, he said ‘I suggest you jump into the pool’. Cohn-Bendit, whose ancestry was German-Jewish, retorted that this was the sort of thing the Hitler Youth had said (or, in another account, the sort of thing a Nazi Minister for Youth would have said).

In Sam Wilkin’s ‘History Repeating’, the exchange is recorded slightly differently from the account in Judt’s book. He says the Minister remarked ‘With a face like yours, no wonder you have these sexual problems. I suggest you jump into the pool’. Whichever account is accurate, rumours that Cohn-Bendit might be expelled, or even deported, as a result of his behaviour led first to a student sit-in and then to a violent confrontation with the police. We know the rest - at one stage most of France was on strike and it looked as though De Gaulle's Fifth Republic, only ten years old, would fall.

Though it is interesting to note that Francois Missoffe, a decent man who had been a prisoner of the Japanese throughout World War Two, later interceded personally to prevent the permanent deportation of Cohn-Bendit. As his obituary in the Guardian noted ‘Once the student revolt was underway, it seemed to French officials that they should send Cohn-Bendit back to his native Germany - which they did. But when he returned to France illegally, it was Missoffe who intervened on his behalf. There was to be no permanent expulsion of Cohn-Bendit.’

As Judt points out, though the seething of violence and window-smashing which began the May events was swiftly given a cloak of politics by organised Trotskyists, the thing was at bottom fired by ‘an essentially anarchist spirit whose immediate objective was the removal and humiliation of authority’.

But what authority was it that they so vaguely but fiercely wanted to overthrow and humiliate? Not all of it, to be sure. They needed some sort of generous state to look after them and carry on giving them other people's money. They didn’t want a world in which they would be sent home and made to do manual work on their parents’ peasant small-holdings, or trained to toil in car factories, pulling levers all day for a wage that would never buy them half of what they desired. They still very much wanted an advanced, rich urban civilisation that would pay them to be and do what they wanted, probably including fornication and drug abuse, in many cases.

I think our goals at the time were completely unspecific, though vast, and that was what made us, as a generation, so dangerous. It is the case that General de Gaulle actually fled the scene (I believe the latest scholarship is that this was a genuine panic on his part, not a tactical move to make the French people realise how much they would miss him). This is astonishing. De Gaulle’s personal and political courage had been demonstrated again and again, in the Great War and then when, wholly alone and without anything but force of personality, he managed to embody Free France and then overcome, at one time or another, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and the French Communist Party. On the day of Paris's liberation, he walked unmoved through the streets as snipers took aim at him. Later he would return to power in what could only have been called a putsch, and remained untroubled by repeated and very violent attempts to murder him by former Army colleagues, at least one of which came within inches of success.

And yet this great man (who in my view had a Marxist-Leninist sense of history and politics without having the objectives of Marxism-Leninism) was scared by a few students chucking stones about on the streets of the Left Bank? He certainly wasn't troubled to begin with, remarking that youth was a thing that didn't last very long, and that young people pretty quickly became middle-aged and then old. No, I think he sensed that this was a far greater convulsion, and one for which his long training and experience had not prepared him. It was the modern world in arms, and he knew instinctively that it would sweep away his own world quite completely. Of course, he could beat it tactically. The pro-Gaullist demonstration which soon followed the Latin Quarter riots vastly outnumbered the student rabble, and the elections of that year overwhelmingly endorsed him. But it would be Daniel Cohn-Bendit, ‘Danny the Red’, who would win in the end. De Gaulle’s Roman Catholic, sovereign France in a ‘Europe of Nations’ is now one with Nineveh and Tyre, replaced by a coldly secular EU province, which doesn’t even have its own currency or borders. Its decline, though different from Britain’s and in some ways not as far advanced, has been steep since 1968. I tend to think that the Mitterrand presidency, much like the Harold Wilson era in Britain though several years later, provided the political context for a cultural revolution, and so brought about much that the 1968ers had desired.

Where did this stuff come from? I’m sure there was no plot. On the other hand, I am sure that plenty of people in political, legal, academic and cultural power were quietly keen to overthrow the wearisome restraints which an increasingly feeble Christianity still placed on their behaviour – especially sexual behaviour. Plainly, the invention and mass availability of the female contraceptive pill had a huge effect on this, as I explore in my 1999 book ‘The Abolition of Britain’. And interestingly, that pill was not a scientific accident but the result of research directed and financed by sexual radicals. So in that one instance there may actually have been a plan to reorder the world, which more or less achieved its objective. Certainly the contraceptive pill comes just after nuclear fission as the most momentous invention of our age. Most people now think there is no necessary connection between sex and procreation, which is why, when pregnancy still happens unexpectedly, they rush to the abortion clinic to restore what they now see as the natural balance.

Then there was music. There may have been nothing in the water, but there were plenty of pollutants in the air and the ether. When I think back to the era, I am amazed at how many years before 1968 the first strange thrill and hum of personal liberation from authority had made itself felt. Above all there was the music, not in any way political but intensely disturbing. Listen to the extraordinary 1963 Motown hit ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’, with its nonsense lyrics (originally pencilled in while they waited for some proper words, eventually left as they were) and the wall-of-sound drumbeat with which it begins. I can remember it being incessantly played, echoing across the bay as dusk fell upon respectable British beach resorts, and we all knew what it meant - though I don’t think anybody said so. It meant sex, and letting go, and not being respectable. But we were all so safe, we weren’t as troubled by it as perhaps we should have been.

One who *was* disturbed was the now deeply unfashionable novelist C.P. Snow, who in 1968 brought out what is perhaps his most powerful book, ‘The Sleep of Reason’. It had been in gestation for some years. In fact we know that it was conceived in 1966 when Snow’s wife Pamela Hansford Johnson, also a novelist, was commissioned by the Sunday Telegraph to attend the harrowing trial of the Moors Murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. She learned from this experience, amongst many other things, that Brady was an enthusiastic reader of the works of the Marquis de Sade. And she wrote an interesting short book ‘On Iniquity’ in which she mused about whether liberalism had gone too far if this was what followed.

I am pretty sure this triggered her husband’s reflections, in a novel which connects a row at a redbrick university, about a Vice-Chancellor who wants to discipline students caught fornicating (a la Nanterre) in halls of residence, with a hideous crime against a child in the countryside nearby. The two women accused of this crime , and whose trial is brilliantly described in the book, are connected with a ‘group’ known to Snow’s hero and narrator, Lewis Eliot.

When he was young and very radical (Eliot, an autobiographical figure, eventually becomes a very left-wing member of the establishment), Eliot had been associated with this emancipated semi-secret society, who had broken the boundaries of the sexual morality of the 1920s. I think this sort of ‘progressivism’ among radical young people had begun before 1914, and redoubled in the inter-war years. It was pretty high-minded and took itself fairly seriously, and it was generally conducted discreetly, as those who too openly ignored the marriage-bond in those days might well damage their careers very seriously.

The sleep of reason in the title refers to Goya’s sombre etching ‘In the Sleep of Reason, Monsters are Born’. Eliot’s old friend George Passant, once brilliant and admired and the centre of the radical pre-war group, is now a washed-up, querulous failure living in something close to squalor. Now Eliot fears that the ideas he once likewise admired have also led to a nasty, dangerous and sordid outcome. Meanwhile his old friend, the Vice-Chancellor is destroyed by his attempt to maintain the old morals. His colleagues think he is too stiff-necked, and abandon him.

I would be glad if many modern 'progressives' would be as thoughtful. I ceaselessly think about this book and its antecedents, just as I ceaselessly try to find a more coherent explanation of the spasm of longing and unjustified fury that went through my part of the safe and prosperous middle class half a century ago.

I cannot deny that the liberation seemed attractive at the time. In that world of bad food, suppressed feeling, and often dull restraint, in which everything seemed universally grey and brown, the fresh green spring of 1968 and the psychedelic orange of the counterculture glowed seductively.

The ceaseless hint, in the music, that there was something happening, somewhere close by, something marvellous which you might join in if only you could find it, was insistent and thrilling.

And we were so safe. These who we blamed for repressing us had brought us up in a world so secure and insulated from sad and violent events, that it never occurred to us that our behaviour would have any worse consequences than a mild bruise, or a headache, or some brief tears, or the occasional broken window.

Yet when I add up the outcomes of that era, for my own generation and for my parents’ generation too, I find an extraordinary amount of real tragedy, madness, death, loss, abject failure, cruelty, destruction and deep, deep disappointment.

We thought we were in a sunny garden, containing nothing more dangerous than a hedgehog, and someone would soon call us in for tea and restore order. We turned out to be on the fringes of a jungle where great beasts fought and tore.